Monday, July 31, 2017

An analysis by Catherine
Theohary for the Congressional Research Service looks at official and
unclassified data on conventional arms transfers to developing nations around
the world by the United States over the years between 2008 and 2015. As
well, it compares the value of the American arms transfers to those made by
other nations and provides us with a ranking of which nations were the greatest
beneficiaries of this "generosity".

The total value of all
conventional arms transfer agreements (representing orders for future delivery)
to both developed and developing nations in 2015 was $79.9 billion, down from
$89 billion in 2014. Here is a graphic showing the value of arms transfer
agreements going back to 2008, showing the split between developed and
developing nations:

As you can see on the
graphic, arms sales to developing nations are very important
to the arms industry. Over the years between 2008 and 2015, conventional
arms transfer agreements (which represent orders for future delivery) to
developing nations comprised 80.24 percent of all international arms transfer
agreements with the level hitting 81.7 percent in 2015. Actual arms
deliveries to developing nations comprised 72.69 percent of the total value of
all such arms deliveries in 2015.

Let's look at the volume
of arms that are being sold to developing nations. In 2015, the total
value of arms transfer agreements to developing nations was $65.2 billion, down
from $79.3 billion in 2014. In total during 2015, $33.6 billion of
conventional arms were actually delivered to developing nations. Here is
a table showing the total value of worldwide arms transfer agreements
to developing nations by supplying nation for the periods between 2008 to 2011,
2012 to 2015 and for 2015 alone:

Over the
period between 2008 and 2015, arms sales to developing nations comprised most
of the total transfer value for all supplying nations. As well, in
constant 2015 dollars, the United States is, by a wide margin, the largest
seller of conventional arms to developing nations over the study period with
total sales (arms transfer agreements) of $208.47 billion compared to $86.12
billion for second place Russia and $51.83 billion for France as shown on this
table:

Here is a table showing
the number of each type of weapons that have been supplied to developing nations
over the periods between 2008 to 2011 and 2012 to 2015:

Now, let's look at the
value of United States conventional arms transfers to developing nations.
This is particularly pertinent given that Saudi Arabia appears to be
using weapons, including U.S.-made cluster bombs, against the Houthis in Yemen.
The total value of U.S. arms transfer agreements with developing nations
decreased to $26.7 billion in 2015 from $29.7 billion in 2014.(page 7)
Despite that, the United States market share value of all such agreements
with developing nations rose to 40.99 percent in 2014 from 37.48% in 2014.
In 2015, key agreements were reached with Saudi Arabia, Iraq and South
Korea. These sales included very expensive major weapons systems as well
as upgrades and support of systems that had previously been sold.

Fortunately, thanks to
the Defense Security
Cooperation Agency website, we are able to clearly ascertain what
equipment was sold to each nation by the U.S. defense industry. Since the study covers only the period to the end of 2015, let's
look at what was sold to Middle East nations in 2016 by nation with the value of the agreements in U.S. dollars:

- continuation of
logistics support services and equipment - $700 million

7.) Kuwait:

- F/A-18 services and
support - $420 million

- field radar system -
$194 million

- F/A-18 Super Hornet
Aircraft - $10.1 billion

- Joint Direct Attack
Munition Tail Kits - $37 million

- recapitalization of
M1A2 tanks - $1.7 billion

8.) Egypt:

- Harpoon Block II
Encapsulated Missiles - $143 million

- Sentinel Radars and
related equipment and support - $70 million

- Common Missile Warning
System for Apache, Blackhawk and Chinook helicopters - $81.4 million

9.) Tunisia:

- Kiowa Warrior Aircraft
equipment - $100.8 million

10.) Israel:

- excess Sea-Hawk
Helicopter equipment and support - $300 million

11.) Morocco:

- TOW 2A Radio Frequency
Missiles - $108 million

As you can see, exporting
their products to the developing nations of the world, particularly the Middle East, brings in significant
revenue to America's military-industrial complex not to mention corporate tax
dollars to Washington. While these sales definitely lead to military
instability in the region, they do keep thousands of Americans in jobs!

Friday, July 28, 2017

While
the United States Congress continues to pile on the anti-Russia sanctions, we
rarely hear (in any detail) the diplomatic response from the Russian Foreign
Ministry. Here is their response in its entirety from
the Russian Foreign Ministry website:

"On
July 27, the US Congress passed a new bill on tougher anti-Russia sanctions.
This measure is further proof of the Unites States’ extremely hostile foreign
policy. Hiding behind its own "exclusiveness", the United
States arrogantly ignores the stances and interests of other countries.

It is common
knowledge that the Russian Federation has been doing everything in its power to
improve bilateral relations, to encourage ties and cooperation with the US on
the most pressing issues on the international agenda including fighting
terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, illegal drug
trafficking, illegal migration, cybercrime, etc. Our understanding has
been that we can only solve these global problems if we work together. We
believe the majority of people in the world share this approach.

Meanwhile,
the United States is using Russia’s alleged interference in its domestic
affairs as an absolutely contrived excuse for its persevering and crude
campaigns against Russia. This activity contradicts the principles of
international law, the UN Charter, WTO regulations and, simply, the common
standards of civilised international communication.

The United
States continues to pass more unlawful sanctions against Russia, to seize
Russia’s diplomatic property, which is formalised in binding bilateral
documents, and to deport Russian diplomats. This is clearly a violation of the
Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and generally recognised diplomatic
practices.

The adoption
of the new sanctions bill is an obvious indication that relations with Russia
are in thrall to the political infighting in the United States. Moreover,
the new bill sets to a goal to create a dishonest competitive advantage for the
US in the global economy through the use of political means. This blackmail
aimed at restricting Russia’s cooperation with its foreign partners threatens
many countries and international businesses.

Despite
Washington’s constant outbursts, we have adhered to responsible and reserved
behaviour and have not responded to express provocations until now. However,
the latest events confirm that certain circles in the US are fixated on
Russophobia and open confrontation with our country.

- Therefore,
we suggest our American counterparts bringing the number of diplomatic and
technical staff at the US Embassy in Moscow, the consulates general in St
Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Vladivostok, into strict correspondence with the
number of Russian diplomats and technical staff currently working in the United
States, until September 1, 2017. This means that the total number of American
diplomatic and consular office employees in the Russian Federation must be
reduced to 455 people. In the event of further unilateral action on behalf of
US officials to reduce the Russian diplomatic staff in the US, we will respond
accordingly.

- Starting
August 1, the use of all the storage facilities on Dorozhnaya Street in Moscow
and the country house in Serebryany Bor will be suspended from use by the US
Embassy.

Russia
reserves the right to resort to other measures affecting US’ interests on a
basis of reciprocity." (my bold)

So far, the
anti-Russia sanctions have accomplished one thing; they have tied Donald
Trump's hands when it comes to dealing with Vladimir Putin. Other than
that, since the first round of sanctions were imposed on the 6th of March 2014
invoking both the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the National
Emergencies Act in response to Russia's alleged interference in Ukraine have
created only short-term economic damage to Russia and look to create further
economic problems for Europe. In fact, up to 2016, a study by the Austrian Institute of
Economic Research showed that the potential trade losses to Europe totalled €34
billion in the short-term and €92 billion in the long-term.

Now you know exactly what the Russians think of the recent Congressional moves. So much for
punishing Russia and Mr. Putin; the unintended consequences have been rather stunning, haven't they?

With
the ongoing and generally ignored WikiLeaks revelations about the CIA and its involvement in our computers and
online activities, recent research by Kamran Ali, Alex Liu, Wei
Wang and Muhammad Shahzad from Michigan State University in the United States and Nanjing University in China gives us cause to question what little remains of our
privacy even further.

As
we are all aware, there is one factor in our lives that has become pervasive,
the presence of WiFi signals. These signals are present in our homes, our
workplaces and in many public areas, offering us unprecedented and often "free" access to the
internet. Many of us who access WiFi, particularly in public areas, are
at least somewhat concerned about the privacy of our communications, however,
we rarely give thought to the idea that someone could actually be detecting
every keystroke that we make. The research by the aforementioned authors
of the paper entitled "Keystroke Recognition Using WiFi Signals" have
shown that this very issue should be of concern to all of us.

It's
obvious that keystroke privacy is important. Without keystroke privacy,
outsiders will be able to access our most private information including
passwords and other sensitive data. In the past, research has studied the
effectiveness of keystroke recognition using three main methods:

1.)
acoustic-based emission approaches where each key on a keyboard produces a
different sound. or the fact that acoustic emanations from different keys
arrive at different surrounding smartphones at different times.

2.)
electromagnetic emission-based approaches where the electromagnetic emanations
from the electrical circuit underneath different keys in a keyboard are
different.

3.)
vision-based approaches where keystrokes are recognized using video
technologies.

For
the first time, the authors of the study noted that WiFi signals can be used to
recognize keystrokes, a single -based keystroke recognition system that they
call "WiKey".

WiKey
consists of two commercial, off-the-shelf WIFi devices, a sender (router) and a
receiver (laptop). The sender continuously emits signals and the
receive continuously receives signals. When a user types on the keyboard
on the WiFi signal receiver end, his or her hands and fingers move in a unique
formation and direction, generating a unique pattern in the time-series of
Channel State Information (CSI) values for each key. The keystrokes of
each keyboard key introduce unique and subtle distortions in the WiFi signals
which can be used to recognize exactly which key was pressed. The authors
developed a keystroke extraction algorithm that utilized CSI streams to
identify which key was depressed by the user. As background information,
CSI values are already being used to detect larger scale human movements
including falling, general household activities, the presence or absence of
humans and estimating the number of people in a crowd. In this research,
the authors are looking at the micro-movements of human hands and fingers when
they type on a keyboard, taking CSI research to a whole new level.

Here
is a quote from the paper showing how data was collected:

“To evaluate the accuracy of WiKey,
we collected training and testing dataset from 10 users. These 10 users were
general university students who volunteered for the experiments and only 2 out
of them had some know how of wire- less communication. Users 1–9 first provided
30 samples for each of the 37 keys (26 alphabets, 10 digits and 1 space and 1 space
bar) by pressing that key multiple times. After this, these users typed the
sentence; the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog two times, without
spaces.

To evaluate how the number of
training samples impact the accuracy, we collected 80 samples for each of the
37 keys from User 10. Afterwards, this user typed each of the following sentences
5 times, without spaces; the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, nobody
knew why the candles blew out, the autumn leaves look like golden
snow, nothing is as profound as the imagination, my small pet mouse escaped
from his cage.We asked users to type naturally with multiple fingers but
only press one key at a time while keeping the average keystroke inter-arrival
time at 1 second. After recording the CSI time series for each of the above
experiments, we first applied our keystroke extraction algorithm on those
recorded CSI time series to extract the CSI waveforms for individual keys and
then extracted the DWT based shape features from each of the extracted
keystroke waveforms.”

The
authors evaluated the accuracy of their keystroke extraction algorithm in terms
of the detection ratio, the ratio of the total number of correctly detected keystrokes
in a CSI time series divided by the total number of actually keystrokes.
The authors discovered that WiKey was able to detect that a keystroke had
taken place 97.5 percentile of the time with at range of between 91.8 percent
and 100 percent for the ten users and that there was a 96.4 percent accuracy
rate in classifying single keystrokes. The keystrokes that were
most often missed were those where there is little movement of the user's
fingers, for example, when typing the keys "a", "d",
"f", "i", "j" and "x", the user's hands
and fingers move very little, resulting in undetected variations in CSI values.

Here
are two graphs showing the accuracy of WiKey for the 26 alphabetical keys and
for 37 keys (26 alphabetical, one space bar and 10 digits) on a standard
keyboard:

WiKey
is capable of recognizing an overall keystroke accuracy of 83.46 percent in the
case of 26 alphabetical keys and 82.87 percent in the case of 37 keys including
numerical keys and the space bar. In real-world experiments, WiKey can
recognize keystrokes in a continuously typed sentence with an accuracy of 93.5
percent.

There
are some limitations to WiKey. It is currently designed for and tested
with only two persons in a room (the tester and the user) and would have to be
altered (trained) to deal with addition motion (i.e. having multiple people
walking around in a library setting). The authors believe that WIKey can
be developed to subtract the waveforms of non-keyboard related motion.
As well, the authors tested WiKey using the same keyboard for all users with
transceivers being located at the same distance and in the same direction with
respect to the keyboard. The authors also instructed the users not to
move their heads or other body parts significantly when typing, however, they
were allowed to make small neutral motions including arm and shoulder
movements.

While
there are obviously limits to the ability to detect keystrokes using WiFi at
this point in time because the technology is still in its infancy, the technique developed by the authors of this paper shows
that micro-gestures can be used to detect a user's keystrokes using
commercially available equipment and WiKey. In the future, the authors
plan to adapt their system to deal with the real world environment where users'
behaviours are less predictable and there is more background "noise".
From what these four gentlemen have proven thus far and with the
ubiquitous nature of WiFi in today's world, it is only a matter of time before
this technology is widely used by the world's intelligence networks, prying
even further into what little remains of our privacy.

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About Me

I have been an avid follower of the world's political and economic scene since the great gold rush of 1979 - 1980 when it seemed that the world's economic system was on the verge of collapse. I am most concerned about the mounting level of government debt and the lack of political will to solve the problem. Actions need to be taken sooner rather than later when demographic issues will make solutions far more difficult. As a geoscientist, I am also concerned about the world's energy future; as we reach peak cheap oil, we need to find viable long-term solutions to what will ultimately become a supply-demand imbalance.